


A Long Coat And A Short Temper

by rightonmybins



Series: The Real Househusbands of Baker Street [21]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Domestic Life at 221B Baker Street, Fluff and Humor, Jealous John Watson, M/M, Sherlock Holmes/His Coat, Sherlock's Coat, Whiny Sherlock, what not to wear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 19:04:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13841067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rightonmybins/pseuds/rightonmybins
Summary: Sherlock suffers from separation anxiety when John sends his coat to the dry cleaner.“I’m lost without my coat,” Sherlock said mournfully.





	A Long Coat And A Short Temper

“JOHN! IT’S GONE!”  
“Sherlock! What..??”  
“MY COAT! MY COAT’S DISAPPEARED! IT’S…”  
Then he suddenly grew very quiet, and murmured something almost inaudible under his breath: “ _The Woman_ …”  
John laughed. “No, Sherlock, that was me. I took your coat.”  
Sherlock whirled on him and John put up his hands defensively.  
“It’s only at the dry cleaner!”

“That was unnecessarily cruel, John.”  
“Sherlock, it had to be done. It was beginning to fall apart – it needed mending, the buttons were nearly off, the hem was falling out. That bullet hole required reweaving. And there were those…stains.”  
“Mere battle scars.”  
“Don’t talk to _me_ about battle scars,” John said ominously.  
“Well, when’s it coming back?! I need my coat!”  
John sighed. “Two weeks.”

“Did it occur to you to ASK ME if you could take it?”  
“I did ask. Repeatedly. You were beginning to look – and smell - like an undercover drug addict again.”  
“John, you have come between me and my coat, which to me is a very serious…”  
“Oh piss off. If I didn't take care of you, who would.”  
They glared at each other for a moment, and then Sherlock said dramatically, “John, you should know I consider myself married to my coat…”  
John laughed. And laughed and laughed. Which only nettled Sherlock further.  
“I was in a relationship with my coat _long_ before I was in one with _you_ ,” Sherlock said, glowering at him.  
That made John laugh even harder so Sherlock threw himself on the sofa to sulk.

At breakfast the next morning John tried to mend matters between them a bit.  
“Sherlock, you could always buy another coat to wear in the meantime.”  
“But that coat was not purchased from a store: it was given to me by an esteemed professor and my mentor, Dr. Bell.”  
“Isn’t Dr. Bell feeling a little chilly right now?”  
Sherlock gave John a stroppy scowl.  
“Dr. Bell made me a gift of the coat when he retired to Provence to paint watercolors and farm olive trees. He said he thought I’d have more need of it now than he did.”  
“So – what’s wrong with just wearing another one for a while?”  
“But it wouldn’t smell right!” Sherlock protested.  
“ ‘Smell right’ - what?!”  
“When it came to me the coat was already permeated with the smells of the chemistry lab, the hot scorch of steam radiators in the lecture rooms, and petrol and river water and a hint of Penhaligon’s Bayolea, which he customarily used after shaving. That simply can’t be duplicated,” Sherlock said, as though explaining something to a remarkably backward child.  
“You mean you have never had it cleaned?” Fastidious John shivered.  
“Of course I’ve had it cleaned! Mrs. Hudson usually works miracles with her clothes-steamer and something she calls ‘Persil’.”  
“I’m sorry, Sherlock, but there were…body fluids on it, and that’s not good for anyone, least of all the coat. And you couldn’t possibly ask Mrs. Hudson to deal with those.”  
“Why not? I’d buy her some new washing-up gloves.”

Depression settled in like a dense London fog. Day after day, Sherlock lay coiled in his chair, pretzel-like, mournfully staring at the doorway as if expecting his coat to come waltzing through it at any moment. He looked like a patient dog waiting for the return of his absent owner.  
John’s miniscule supply of patience was rapidly depleted by Sherlock's moping, his refusal to eat, and his disinterest in pursuing any new cases.  
“I’m lost without my coat,” Sherlock said mournfully.  
“I thought you once said you would be lost without ME.”  
“Yes, but you’re here and my coat’s not.”  
John faced him down, hands on hips. “Are you going to get dressed today? Or are you just going to lie around moaning in your dressing gown again?”  
“There’s no point in my getting dressed,” Sherlock said. “My coat’s not here, and I don’t feel dressed without my coat even if I choose to not _wear_ my coat. So the answer to that would be NO.”  
He closed his eyes to screen out the cruel, cruel world.

John was usually a proponent of tough love where Sherlock's temper was concerned. But against his better judgment, he presented a number of coat-alternatives in an attempt to placate him.  
First he brought home an ulster, the garment beloved of many Victorian gentlemen: a long, dramatic overcoat with shoulder cape.  
Sherlock was resistant, which was putting it mildly.  
“What is that tweed tent thing. I hate it.”  
“It’s a classic piece of men’s haberdashery. It has flair.”  
“You say ‘flair’ - I say ‘fugly.’ ”  
“Sherlock, just try it on.”  
With much resentful huffing, Sherlock put it on and then twisted, spun, rotated, revolved and pirouetted about the sitting room, causing the shoulder cape to flap feebly about his shoulders like the wings of an ungainly bird.  
He swiftly shed the hateful thing and flung it over John like a painter’s drop cloth.  
“I can’t twirl properly in this!”

Then there was the Burberry mac:  
“Hideous.”

The Barbour waxed cotton hunting jacket:  
“Who do you think I am, Daniel Craig?”

The leather motorcycle jacket:  
“It’s something different – rather sexy, I thought.” John waggled his eyebrows with a wicked grin. “Might do you good, change your image a bit?”  
“Oh! Here’s an idea,” Sherlock said sarcastically. “Why don’t you wear one too, and we can speed all over London on a cycle with a little sidecar. You’d ride in the sidecar, of course.”  
For John, that distressing mental image burst his erotic little makeover daydream.

The anorak:  
“John, not only is that garment a sartorial insult to humanity, but I believe you may be making some sort of veiled comment about my obsessive tendencies. I _have_ seen ‘Trainspotting’, you know.”

Nothing could satisfy Sherlock - he continued to be a bloody-minded git and to swan around in his dressing gown wallowing in his misery. John gave up trying to please him and slept on the far side of the bed with a pillow over his head to muffle all the plaintive sighs.

Finally the long-awaited day arrived. John slid out of bed without waking Sherlock, walked up the street to the dry cleaner and redeemed the coat. He brought it home and laid it across the sofa so that it would be the first thing Sherlock saw when he got up.  
Sherlock immediately seized it like a returned lover. He freed it from the dry cleaner’s plastic shroud and pressed his face into its folds, inhaling deeply.  
And then fell back coughing and wheezing from the noxious fumes.  
“Noooooooo!” he cried out. “IT’S RUINED!”  
“Sherlock, calm down. Yes, it smells a little…unpleasant right now, but it just wants airing out. Besides, it’s not nearly as pervasive and objectionable as formaldehyde.”  
“But I UNDERSTAND formaldehyde!” Sherlock shouted.

After a cuppa and a half-slice of toast (which he simply played with until he reduced it to crumbs), Sherlock was somewhat quieter but still sullen.  
“I’d like to pay a cab driver to tie it to his bonnet and drive it around London for a day, to instill all the petrol smells and soot and detritus of the city into its threads again.”  
John just shook his head and exhaled softly. He was utterly out of sorts with Sherlock's continual whining.  
“Why don’t you just suck it up and wear it.”  
“It smells bad,” Sherlock said petulantly.  
“Or maybe Mrs. Hudson could, I don’t know, spray it with something.”  
“I refuse to go about reeking of Flowerbomb, which Mrs. Hudson tends to use like fly spray. OH!”  
“You’re going to try fly spray?”  
“No! But John, what it needs is some olfactory rehabilitation - that will restore its former glory!”

Sherlock's new project occupied most of the next two days. The coat - and John - were subjected to numerous inconveniences and insults.  
First John found it wadded up in the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer along with an aromatic bag of thumbs.  
Then he sat down on a particularly lumpy section of the sofa, and discovered the coat had been crushed under the cushions to collect all of the litter and debris that sifted out of their pockets.  
There was no room in the laundry hamper because the coat was taking a nap among the dirty socks.  
And when John felt extra-chilly during the night, he found the coat hanging out of the open bathroom window absorbing the currents of vehicular air that drifted down Baker Street.  
And God only knew what it suffered on the morning Sherlock took it to Bart’s morgue.

Late that afternoon Sherlock threw open the front door and leaped up the stairs to the flat, three at a time.  
“John! The Coat is back!” he announced rapturously, doing a theatrical spin in the doorway.  
John looked up briefly from his newspaper and said, “That’s nice,” and went back to reading.  
Sherlock, however, was not to be denied his measure of joy.  
“Oh, now I finally feel complete. All is right in my sphere, and I’m ready to take on the world once more.” He spun around again just from sheer exuberance, before flopping down in his chair with a sigh of supreme contentment.  
John didn't even look up.  
“Sherlock…it’s a coat. It’s not your best mate, most definitely not. Now if you don’t mind, I'm trying to read.”

Sherlock’s manic good humor annoyed John no end: all this ridiculous fuss about a piece of clothing. “Married to his coat” indeed. And his insistence in banging on about how that relationship predated John Watson, The Blogger Whom The Great Detective Could Not Get Along Without. John did not fancy being a part of some weird wardrobe-centered romantic triangle.  
He threw down his newspaper and put on his own coat (which was merely a garment, with no tortured relationship bullshit attached). What he needed was to walk off his bad attitude and Sherlock's irksome and childish behavior.  
“Where are you going?” Sherlock asked.  
“OUT.”

John came home hours later with a white plastic carrier bag of takeaway curry and an improved attitude. Annoyingly Happy Sherlock was far less irritating than Tediously Whiny Sherlock, he had decided. And if Sherlock’s coat was something of a security blanket for him, then so be it. It might be just the one thing that was keeping him (relatively) sane, and who was John to judge him for that.

Sherlock seemed happy to see him (and the curry). He was still wearing his coat, and John good-naturedly remarked: “I see we’ll be three for tea this evening”.  
He handed Sherlock a small black and white package. Penhaligon’s Bayolea: the hallmark scent of the traditional English gentleman.  
“Er, John, thank you, but…. all of my personal care products are …”  
“It’s not for you,” John said. “It’s for the coat.”  
Sherlock opened the bottle and set free the aromatic scents of citrus, spices and woods to float around the sitting room. He dabbed a bit of it under his lapels and pocket flaps. Then he smiled and executed a gleeful, graceful coat twirl.  
“A man and his coat – reunited at last. What a heartwarming story,” John said dryly.  
“Why John, I believe you’ve been a bit jealous.”  
“You’re not a couple, Sherlock!” John laughed.  
Sherlock sighed with satisfaction, and stroked the lapel with the red buttonhole.  
“Yes we are.”

**Author's Note:**

> Arthur Conan Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell in 1877 when he was studying to be a doctor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and Dr. Bell was one of his professors. He is considered to be the model for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
> 
> Daniel Craig wore a Barbour Beacon Heritage Sports Jacket in 'Skyfall'.
> 
> Anorak: A hooded, sometimes fur-trimmed outdoor jacket. More importantly, a term of mild abuse directed almost exclusively at men who are obsessively interested in an obscure subject and/or activity (like trainspotting).


End file.
